Low Complex CORDIC-based Hand Movement Recognition Design Methodology for Rehabilitation and Prosthetic Applications

Hand movement recognition using Electromyography (EMG) signals have gained much significance lately and is extensively used for rehabilitation and prosthetic applications including stroke-driven disability and other neuromuscular disorders. Herein, quantitative analysis of EMG signals is very crucial. However, such applications are constrained by power consumption limitations due to the battery backup necessitating low-complex system design and the on-chip area requirement. Existing hand movement recognition methodologies using single-channel EMG signal involve computationally intensive stages, including Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA), feature extraction, and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) classification, which can not be mapped onto the low-complex architecture directly from the algorithmic level. The high computational complexity of LDA classification makes it difficult to be used for low-complex applications. In this paper, we introduce a low-complex CORDIC-based hand movement recognition design methodology targeting resource-constrained rehabilitation applications. This work explores replacing LDA classification with K-Means clustering due to its reduced complexity and efficient clustering algorithm. CORDIC-based K-Means clustering is used to further reduce the overall computational complexity of the system. The proposed low complex, K-Means clustering-based hand movement recognition for classifying seven hand movements using single-channel EMG data is found to be 99.77 % less complex and 1.28% more accurate than the conventional LDA-based classification.